Learned bird songs evolve via cultural evolution, with song patterns transmitted across generations by imitative learning. In Darwin's finches of the Galápagos Islands, males learn songs from their fathers, and song types can be maintained across multiple generations. However, little is known about the time frame over which specific song types are preserved, in the face of copy errors and corre...

The central theme of this paper is the way that the racial wage hierarchy evolved in South Africa over the period 1993 to 1999 amongst full-time regular employees of normal working age, but excluding those in the primary sector and the defence forces. We find that the transition to democratic rule in 1994 was accompanied by an improvement in the wage position of the majority African workforce r...

A major task in human genetics is to understand the nature of the evolutionary processes that have shaped the gene pools of contemporary populations. Ancient DNA studies have great potential to shed light on the evolution of populations because they provide the opportunity to sample from the same population at different points in time. Here, we show that a sample of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) co...

Is Open Space Preservation a Form of Exclusionary Zoning? The Evolution of Municipal Open-Space Policies in New Jersey Stephan Schmidt Cornell University Kurt Paulsen University of Wisconsin, Madison Abstract: This paper examines the evolving policy context of municipal open space acquisition in New Jersey. We hypothesize that voters’ interest in open space protection is sensitive to changes in...

We study the evolution of cooperation in the collective-risk social dilemma game, where the risk is determined by a collective target that must be reached with individual contributions. All players initially receive endowments from the available amount of common resources. While cooperators contribute part of their endowment to the collective target, defectors do not. If the target is not reach...

We investigate the origin and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship. We compile a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world which documents how these institutions have evolved from the legal tradition of common and civil law established in the course of the 19th century. We show that in the postwar period citizenship laws have responded endogenously and systemat...

Languages evolve over space and time. Illuminating the evolutionary history of language is important because it provides a unique opportunity to shed light on the population history of the speakers. Spatial and temporal aspects of language evolution are particularly crucial for understanding demographic history, as they allow us to identify when and where the languages originated, as well as ho...

Spectacularly preserved non-avian dinosaurs with integumentary filaments/feathers have revolutionized dinosaur studies and fostered the suggestion that the dinosaur common ancestor possessed complex integumentary structures homologous to feathers. This hypothesis has major implications for interpreting dinosaur biology, but has not been tested rigorously. Using a comprehensive database of dinos...

Better knowledge of the biology of breast cancer has allowed the use of new targeted therapies, leading to improved outcome. High-throughput technologies allow deepening into the molecular architecture of breast cancer, integrating different levels of information, which is important if it helps in making clinical decisions. microRNA (miRNA) and protein expression profiles were obtained from 71 ...

Fossils not only provide the geologic record of evolution, they also remind us of the crucial role that mineralized tissues play in the biology of organisms. Mineralized tissues are composite structures consisting of an inorganic mineral phase, an organic phase, and cells. In this article, I provide an overview of the mineral–matrix relationships in bones and teeth, highlight the significant di...